| DVD Roundup September 2006
20th Century Fox’s Robert Altman Collection
 Robert Altman, now 81, is a
movie-making maverick whose career spans 55 years. Through that time he has directed
dozens of motion pictures, including this spring’s critically acclaimed hit, A
Prairie Home Companion. He has made films for many different studios, and in the 1970s
-- an especially productive period for Altman -- he made a number of movies for 20th
Century Fox, who have now released four of them as the Robert Altman Collection: M*A*S*H,
A Perfect Couple, A Wedding, and Quintet.
When the Robert Altman Collection arrived, A
Prairie Home Companion was just hitting theaters. Growing up, I’d been a big fan
of the M*A*S*H TV series inspired by Altman’s original 1970 film, but I
wasn’t up to speed on Altman’s work. After watching A Prairie Home Companion,
I picked up on a filmmaking style that was not overly managed from behind the camera, yet
was reined-in enough to fit the framework of the intended story: a style that allowed the
cast to be free to act and explore all of their characters’ possibilities. A director
secure enough to point an actor in a direction and then capture what happens on film,
Altman may be one of the greatest ensemble directors of all time.
Tangible evidence of that statement are two of the films
included here: M*A*S*H and A Wedding. Both have large casts and multiple
backstories that weave their way throughout the scripts. M*A*S*H (1970) is the
story of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. The mass public is more familiar with
the gentler TV series; the film is a bare-bones version of the 4077. This is the one
Altman film I was somewhat familiar with, but I hadn’t known that the theme song used
for both film and TV show has words (they’re sung only in the film). Dark yet funny,
the lyrics prepare you for what’s to come: "Suicide is painless."
A Wedding (1978) is more like A Prairie Home
Companion and Gosford Park, all of which have ensemble casts that inhabit the
same space and continually collide with one another to create wonderful scenes. With a
cast that includes Carol Burnett, Desi Arnaz Jr., Lillian Gish, Mia Farrow, and Pat
McCormick, how much better can it get? Altman guides the film through scenes containing
sheer comedy followed by scenes of extraordinary emotional complexity, and somehow wraps
it all up into a single coherent film.
The remaining two films, both made in 1979, are very
different. A Perfect Couple, the story of a couple’s budding love, is billed
as a "delightfully upbeat romantic comedy." Though the film seems to go in many
directions at once, it is Altman’s attempt to be more mainstream. While researching
these films to figure out why these particular titles made the collection, I read that A
Perfect Couple was shot within the context of the Hollywood "machine" and
the cookie-cutter pictures being produced in the 1970s. It mostly succeeds at being
mainstream, but is sidetracked by the presence of the band to which the Marta Heflin
character belongs. Turns out that the band was a real band, formed by one of the
film’s writers, Allan F. Nicholls, a year before the film was shot. Some say that
Altman used the film as a vehicle to promote the band. Nonetheless, A Perfect Couple
is not one of his best, though at times it’s really funny.
Quintet is the oddest choice, and by far the least
enjoyable. A film that reminded me of something from Stanley Kubrick, its long scenes are
accompanied by irritating music that sometimes seems to never end. From the description
provided on the box, it seemed as if Quintet would be right up my alley: "a
post-apocalyptic drama set in a winter wasteland." The video has blurry edges; only
the center of the picture in focus. I wondered, the entire time I was watching this film,
what the purpose of the effect was. In the feature included in the extras section, the
explanation was less than satisfactory. Seems they dreamed it up one day and decided to
take a chance. The reason for Quintet’s inclusion in this collection must be
to display the range of Altman’s impressive catalogue.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment in the collection as a
whole is the quality of its sound and images. The video of all four films was good but not
great, and its video quality is where a film really reveals its age. All of the films are
in widescreen format. The sound is acceptable, with the choice of mono or stereo. It seems
that no remastering was ordered for any of these films, and it shows. This doesn’t
take away from this great collection of movies, but a collection such as this should be
presented in a more polished way. M*A*S*H includes the same extras provided on the
two-disc set released in 2002, as well as this collection’s sole audio commentary.
Each film gets a unique featurette and its original theatrical trailer; other than that,
each stands on its own.
To sum up in a four-DVD collection the work of a director
such as Robert Altman, who has directed more than 40 films since 1951, is hardly fair. The
fact that he’s still making movies into his 80s says a lot. Because all four of these
films were released in the 1970s, I think of this as the Robert Altman Collection,
Vol.1. For a complete overview of this great director’s work, we need a company
like the Criterion Collection, which can cross company lines.
...Randall Smith
randalls@hometheatersound.com |
